Farmed fish are often fed on forage fish (such as anchovies and sardines) caught from the wild. A new paper points out that demand for forage fish to support aquaculture production is forecast to grow beyond the maximum sustainable supply level. The authors calculate that demand for forage fish could be reduced to below the maximum supply limit by combining a number of measures: reducing use of forage fish in land-based agriculture, replacing some forage fish with fish trimmings from processing, and reducing the proportion of forage fish in the diets of non-carnivorous farmed fish.

The first systematic analysis of marine wilderness around the world finds that only 13% of the ocean can still be classed as wilderness, i.e. having experienced low impacts from human-caused stressors such as fertilizer runoff, fishing and climate change. Only 4.9% of that wilderness (covering 0.6% of total ocean area) falls within official marine protected areas.

The FAO has released its 2018 report on world fishery and aquaculture statistics. Key findings include that fisheries output peaked in 2016, having remained approximately static since the late 1980s, while aquaculture production is rising, as shown in the figure below. In 2015, fish accounted for around 17% of global animal protein consumption. One third of fish stocks are currently overfished, although progress has been made in the United States and Australia in increasing the proportion of fish stocks that are sustainably fished.

Many important marine species, including marine mammals, sea turtles and seabirds, are threatened by bycatch - i.e. being accidentally caught by fishers who are targeting other species. A new paper finds that around half of the populations threatened by bycatch could be protected by managing fish stocks to maximise fishery profits, which would reduce bycatch as a side-effect of reducing overfishing.

Building UK fish stocks up to their maximum sustainable yields could increase fish catches by 27%, create 5,100 new jobs and add £319 million to the UK’s GDP, NGO Oceana reports. Oceana points out that Brexit may provide a window of opportunity to change the UK’s fishing practices for the better.

Genetically modified salmon could potentially be on the US market by 2019.

This paper presents the findings of a large-scale study which used global tracking data on sea-going vessels to characterise the scale, distribution and drivers of the global fishing effort.

A common hypothesis used to link declining human health to environmental outcomes predicts that illness will reduce human populations or harvest effort, thus benefitting the environment. When investigating the behaviour of fishers around Lake Victoria in Kenya, this research found little evidence that illness reduced fishing effort to indirectly benefit the environment. Instead, ill fishers shifted their fishing methods – using more illegal methods concentrated in inshore areas, that are less physically demanding but environmentally destructive.

This paper models human and natural influences on the global capture of wild marine fish. The researchers show that wild fish harvest increases during the 20th century were most likely explained by improvements in fishing technology. Their simulated future projections, that assume ongoing technological progress and open access (i.e. no policy constraints), suggest a long-term decrease in harvest due to over-fishing.